No Matter Where You Go You Stay Where You Are

As some of my older readers know, when I am not in the mood to generate a current post, I reach into the past. For today, I'll go back to an old English mindbender, written on September 11th, 2008.

The Mindbender is: No matter how far you go, you stay where you are.

A Summary:

People are boring, and constant, and never ever change, and I think that whole concept is obnoxious. My introduction is only two sentences long because I am lazy. Also, I'm using the first person, because I'm cool like that.

The Palace Thief is a book. It involves a big Roman history competition and togas, but all anybody cares about is that Patrick Dempsey is in the movie. I suppose that I can let Cammie keep her weird George Clooney thing if I can have Dempsey. Anyways, the cheating boy in the competition grows up to be a cheating, good for nothing grown up. He stays where he is. Isn't that a great example?

I think the cheating boy is a dickwad. I'm going to try to pretend that he's an isolated dickwad.

Oh, darn, Sarah Bareilles says that people don't change either. Since it's set to music, she must be right. Wait- Sarah's actually talking about moving around in the literal sense. But it's a song, so we'll pretend that it's figurative.

People are always trying to change, so the mindbender is wrong. I know that it's actually right, but I am going to be an optimistic for as long as I possibly can.

The End

Interestingly, even though the mindbender was written on September 11th, I make no mention of September 11th, despite the fact that it is a somewhat important date. To see if I even thought about the historical significance (twin towers! ahhh!), I went through my old journals to find something. Below is my September 11th entry:

Still Crampy. Still bleeding profusely from my vagina. It is muy disgusto.

Mom's going to the hospital tomorrow to have her uterus scraped out. She has to be anesthesized and shit. It's kinda annoying, but standard procedure. Intellectually, I'm sure she'll be fine, but I can't shake this odd foreboding feeling.

Though that could be more related to my audition tomorrow. Turns out there'll probably be only one piano, so that guaranteed spot- basically unattainable. Not that I won't try, but I'm somewhat lacking, confidence wise.

But it's alright. Worst case, I'll apologize to the set painters for my illness and join up. I'll go once or twice a week and paint out my sorrows, then try not to cry when everyone walks out and they're having fun and Ryan is being sexy and wahhhh!!!!

Well, that did not help.

I need to go to sleep I'll try to dream of D (I think?) from music theory, and hope that Mario turns out to be wonderful (and takes the train).

See, better already.

As I'm sure you noticed, this, too, contains no mention of terrorists. My aversion to discussion of world disasters seems to have been present for at least a year.

Interestingly, the mindbender is saved as 5.doc, but is titled mindbender 4.

How very peculiar.

Operation Forget Mario

I have decided that this ridiculous crush thing is going to stop right here. I am sick of all the blushing and other ridiculousness, and I am moving onto greener pastures. Well, I'll move onto greener pastures eventually. I suppose that'll have to be phase II, assuming the phase I trials go well.

Anyways, my plan is to excise him from my mind and life for the rest of September (the life removal bit is made more difficult by having two classes with him, but I have faith!). I will not bring him up in conversation. If any of you attempt to tease me, I will hit you or ignore you, depending on my mood. Please don't point out the blushing, since I'm hoping that it'll go away if I stop thinking about it. I'm not going to write about him either, here or in my journal. I will even try not to think about him, although that really didn't work to well last fall. This will be an entirely Mario-less month. After 30 days, on October 1st (HALLOWEEN! (that is a joke directed at Tierra, who doesn't actually read this, but whatever)), I will stop and reevaluate.

Don't wish me luck. That would be a reminder.

Mi Casa No Es Su Casa

My house isn't your house, extended family members, and I would really like to have my space back.

Well, my cousins aren't that bad. Now that the one with Down's Syndrome who breaks/clogs/loses everything she touches (I love her, but DON'T TOUCH THAT COMPUTER!) is gone, things are a lot calmer. Also, I have my room to myself tonight, which is truly a blessing.

At least I'm home, and my shower actually works and my bed is comfortable and my piano is lovely (even if my fingers are so out of shape I can't play for more than a 20 minute block).

A prophecy written on July 17th, before fourth grade.

"The music holds and endless gift

Better together than divided

In wish to stop an endless plight

the 3 must be reunited.

Do you like it?

answer here:

"

The funny part is, I actually expected the journal to answer. The handful of entries are all written in magic marker, and are full of spelling errors.

Also, here is my idea of a more somber entry:

Dear Journal,

Last week was thaniversory of Sept. 11. The thin I don't get is why I didn't feel sad. I was more annoyed that people seemed to celebrate death. Oh, that reminds me, Dad got laser eye surgery, and now he doesn't wear glasses anymore. He doesn't look different to me though.

From,

Tea

I have absolutely no idea why Sept. 11 reminded me of laser eye surgery.

Journal Highlights

1/31/08

Well... today in English Ms. Seltzia read aloud a page of Girl in Hyacinth Blue that basically described sex using musical metaphors. I, for one, was giggling like crazy. Gretchen, unfortunately, was too busy ignoring me to catch my eye, but it was still funny. Also, we discussed vocab tests and how we study. Jess goes "I IM with Tybalt then print out the conversations. That helps a lot." and the teacher goes "really?" and the class takes a couple of seconds to process this before a low ooooh! broke out, and we started laughing. And Jess is like, "it helps! really!" and blushes a bit. Then the teacher goes, "there's definitely a bit of pink in her complexion." By that point, Tybalt was extremely red as well, and attempting to laugh it off, but in an extremely awkward way.

3/6/09

I feel stressed. Let the stress flow from the ache in my stomach and heart, through my shoulder, down my elbow, jetting down the rest of my fingertips and flowing to the tip of my pen, where the dark of ink releases it from my body.

That's a bit better.

11/7/08

Back to SHP tomorrow. Mario's a db. It wouldn't bother me much, generally, but I'm far more attracted to him than I should be, and can't bare to just blow him off, but something just makes me want to slap him, huge pores and all. I am desperately hoping that we reach some level of conversation by June, or I swear to a possibly existing deity, I will cry.

11/18/08

Today was the drawing field trip to the Met....blah blah blah etc. At the end of the trip, Mom told us to meet her at the temple. Me and Gemma were with her, so it was no biggie, but everyone else was late. Mom was so worried. She thought that she was such an awful chaperone, they'd never let her come on a trip again. By the way, it's requiring a colossal amount of effort not to mention Mario right now. That boy has somehow managed to insinuate himself into my thoughts, and it is somewhat aggravating AND I can't talk about him, because Nyx always laughs and GAH!

1/14/o9

I'm glad I don't have to come-of-age twice. Seriously, though, I always feel like I'm a character in some sort of book. Currently I'm in the midst of a classic tale in a high school, with a science and feminism subplot. I'm also in the exposition of another imaginary romance, but right now, I mostly just feel myself growing up. It feels like I'm too self aware.

Vacation

I've been 'cleaning' for the past hour, but I keep getting distracted by the cool stuff I find. My journal is now covered with adhesive glow-in-the-dark planets, and my leg is sporting what I like to call "ballerina mash-up." It's a statement about.....um.....the destruction of childhood dreams upon encountering an adult body (I learned that in Rediscovering Ophelia today).

These are each the first sentence or two of my vacation journal entries from the summer after 6th grade.

Costa Rica, August something

The plane ride here was terrible.

8/7/05

Today's horsebackride was boring. Pretty much, we just walked. And walked. And walked.

8/8/05

only a single word must be used to describe the worst thing about Tortuga Lodge: bugs.

later that day

dinner was umm.....interesting.

8/10

yesterday was actually pretty fun.

8-14-05

This was definitely the best place we stayed yet.

Thursday, in CO

camp was a total bore.

--end of journal

complain? who, me?

Moving On

Sturken has a date today, and I am totally and completely chill.

Well, mostly chill. Not so chill that I'm not going to write about him here.

Basically, I had a crush on him from whenever I first started liking boys up until last month- which isn't to say that I wasn't into other boys. But, always, in the back of my mind, there was always a little thought of Sturken, and little pondering that "if I love him so much, is it really fair for me to pretend to love someone else?"

Yes, I said love. I can verify it with a lot of entries in my diary from the Fall of 9th grade in which I wrote just that. He's a family friend, a nice jewish boy who I've known since infancy. In middle school, back when he was shorter than me, he was nerdy, but he moved to Europe after 8th grade, and he seems to have turned into a bit of a jock. Well, he is addicted to those football video games on the X-box, and last time we visited him, he spent the entire time betting me that he could do a slam-dunk jump (not that he could actually slam dunk) and touch high objects (I, of course, dutifully pretended that he couldn't).

All in all though, I was somewhat obsessed. I currently view him as my first love, even if it wasn't reciprocated. Seriously, though, I had it bad. Read this:

We shivered as we waited in line, chattering about school and the meaningless information that, if anyone else were explaining, I would discard immediately. Our sisters, my two and his one, stood a bit behind us, huddled together, giggling between high-pitched whispers. We continued our talk, moving on to our friends. He poked fun at the names of mine, over pronouncing every consonant, I laughed, allowing the sound to bubble out, now that the darkness prevented him from seeing my blush. I retaliated, teasing him for his association with a boy who had acquired a mullet over the summer. He laughed too, creases forming around his eyes. I carefully approached the question of when he would return home. We were only family friends, I wasn’t supposed to miss him, yet the question pushed at the edge of my consciousness even when I had gone months without seeing him. “Soon, I hope," he told me, and I wondered at his words. Was it because he wanted to see me? Or was he simply tired of this land of rain and foreign accents? I wished that he, and not his parents, who debated a move to Singapore, was right. I wanted to be able too see him, hear his voice turn deep and slow when he tried to seem manly, then speed up, changing to its ordinary tenor when he was distracted. I wanted to remember every detail of him, to learn more of him than I ever could in a few short days every year. I watched his face carefully, searching for any hidden meaning, but why would he have let one show? I kept my thoughts just as tucked away.

We reached the front, and received our crêpes, thin pancakes filled with melted chocolate, almost too hot, compared to the cold air. We settled around a small table, the little sisters sitting, and us two standing, watching over them, just as we always had. The sisters were talking about him. “His nose is crooked,” his sister said, “isn’t it crooked?” She looked at me. I gazed at his face, head tilted. “It’s,” I paused. Beautiful? Perfect? Attractive? While he’d love to hear those, they revealed more of my thoughts than I cared to share. It fit his face perfectly, slightly large, with the softened angles of a young teenager, but “it fits your face” sounds like an insult to the rest of him. The pause was dragging out, and it was sounding like I truly believed his nose crooked. I finally managed a strangled “fine,” a tiny, meaningless word, good or bad, a placeholder, like everything else I said to him. I took another bite of the warm chocolate and gazed at him, trusting the darkness to hide me. It didn’t make sense to risk telling him, not when we only had two days together, and any potential payoff would be marginal. Two days of platonic joking far outweighed two days of what I feared would be pain. I watched him as he smiled, fighting to remember each and every image so that when I was home, I could imagine that I still had him, the crêpes, and the night.

I wrote that last year, back when the obsession thing was in full swing. Last month, though, it abruptly disintegrated. I remember biking around during Christmas break, praying that my next push of the pedals would be enough to push all the need for him out, and, miraculously, it was. It's almost enough to make me believe in God.

Anyways, Sturken has a date, and my only thought was a hope that he has a nice time. No jealousy, no nothing.

I'm cured.

ZZZzzz

I am tired as shit. Basically since I got home I've been doing homework and procrastinating my homework. I really need to work on that... tomorrow I'll truly try to finish by eight.

In other news, vanadium batteries sound pretty cool. There was an article in Discover about them. Basically, they have V(+2-5) on different sides of a membrane and they're allowed to oxidize. I learned the basic scientific principles in chemistry but I don't really get how it works.

Pit orchestra tryout on friday. I'm playing Dr. Gradus from Debussey's Children's Corner on the piano, and sight-reading something. We'll see how it goes, but if I don't get in, I'll probably cry, seeing as it's practically the only thing I do outside of school.

This is a pathetique blog. Unless I'm doing issues, I shouldn't bother. tooth brushing and journal, here I come!